Life Through My Lens
She was a collector.
She was a collector.
For hours on end, she would scour old barns with half-blind widows
who didn’t need a computer to know where she put that compote with the hobstar base
or dusty store fronts converted from grocery stores no one needed anymore…
The Detours are the Path
This was not the plan. I had a plan. If you know me personally, you know it was a solid plan. Spreadsheets were made. Gantt charts catalogued the aggressive but manageable timelines of key activities and their dependencies in an intentional array of colors. Resources...
Seven things I learned about leadership from camping with my dad
In the 1970s, my father owned an Army surplus oilskin tent. In my three-foot-tall memory, it slept ten people. I didn’t even know hotels were an option until I was in high school. Growing up in Washington State, I spent many rainy nights—and more than a few rainy...
The self-inflicted wound of denial
Does this ever happen to you? It happens to me. Every. Single. Time. I'm working on my latest story or making a colorful graph depicting my predicted end date based on my ambitious daily word goals (also a work of fiction, by the way). In the corner of the screen, I...
Life is not all unicorn farts and sprinkles.
What follows is an abbreviated version of a text exchange that transpired this morning—after the reality that my kid is all grown up and moving across the country in three months hit me right in the forehead, and I spent a sleepless night thinking about all the things...
Revising: A part of life
At a conference last year, an author spoke about revising her manuscripts with a look of rapture usually reserved for the sacred or the sensual. My first thought? Are you kidding me?! What about revising and editing could possibly evoke this level of euphoria?...